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Yeah, I'm on the vim-l list, though I haven't been paying much attention to the messages so far.

I've only fixed the redirect pages that were easy to find and easy to fix. There are a few that I couldn't readily find the actual page the redirects should point to, so I left them alone.

About having redirects categorized, I really think they shouldn't be part of the VimTip category. Maybe a separate category for redirect pages? I wonder if there's a way to get a list of redirect pages without having to have them categorized.

So far I haven't been doing much except for the things that I can find that are "obvious". I figure once there's an established convention for deleting/merging tips, and for editing comments into the actual tip, etc, I'll try to do more.

Thanks for pointing that out. I am embracing the "be bold" wiki policy, and am adopting the attitude that I know what I'm doing ... but in fact I've only been doing serious wiki stuff for a month, and I don't really know what's going on!

I took an interest in the script you edited because I've been thinking I need something like that to insert wiki tags around text. I started by noticing that the 'if' statements had lost their indenting ... then I wondered whether pre was better than space. I just posted my conclusion to the vim-l mailing list that in fact space has some big drawbacks - see the vim-l archive.

I will update the Golden Rules you mentioned.

BTW after changing the formatting of the tip, I tried to use it - doesn't work! I'm going to grapple with that shortly.

Hello! Thanks for pointing out the templates for vim scripts links and parent info on categories to me - I must have overlooked that. The vim script template surely makes much sense, considering the vim homepage might some day change it's url..

As for the categories, I just tried fill some missing descriptions to already existing categories - there are already tips linking to Templates and Completion categories.
I agree they have overlapping meaning with Automatic Text Insertion although one may argue that they are more specific - I personally associate Templates more with automatic text expansion from predefined set of shortcuts a'la TextMate/SnippetsEmu and Completion more with Omni-completion/Intellisense feature.
Perhaps it's a good idea to make both of them subcategories of Automatic Text Insertion.

Hi Santhalus. It's great that you took the trouble to respond to my comments. There is no golden wiki rule about how to use User Talk pages, but I'll mention what makes sense to me for the future. Since I started the conversation on your talk page, I think it would be good for you to reply there, and my reply to your reply to be there, etc. However, we are here now, so that will do.

Luc's comment above is correct, although he might have welcomed your contributions first<g>. I will make one comment here, but let's agree to take any further discussion about categories preferably to the vim-l mailing list, or if you don't want to join the list, please post on the talk page of Vim Tips Wiki:Category guidelines.

Anyway, my one comment is that some editors have added dummy [[Category:xxx]] entries, but IMHO we should apply quite a bit of thought before actually creating the xxx category.

That seemed more sensible to me too but I was not sure whether you get notified when I edit my own talk page. I see how it works now. I'm rather a newbie as far as Wiki and Vim are concerned, so please forgive me if I do something dumb :) All your comments are appreciated. As for the categories I think I have to get better overview of all the tips in general first, then I might come up with some suggestions.

Don't worry, you're not the only wiki-newbie here ^^'. Regarding the notifications, we're notified if we check the "Watch this page" checkbox when editing a page. And don't hesitate to share your thoughs on categories. A lot of work is still to be done. As I see it, as a first step, a first categorization will help identify duplicates. A little rework may be required after that, then a neater categories tree should emerge.

BTW, I've initiated the Vim Tips Wiki talk:Category guidelines. I've copied there what as been said here, and on Santhalus's Talk page. This way, it would be easier to follow the discussion.

Sorry about messing up your script - that was my fault. I've had my eye on this page for a while and finally got around to fixing it up. Is the renaming thing pretty much done now that JohnBot is on the prowl, or do I need to be more careful about this in the future?

No problem! It tested my error handler very nicely. I have finished page renaming for now. In general, I would far prefer people to "be bold" and do things they think would be an improvement, so the fact that occasionally there will be a conflict with what I'm doing is fine by me.

Now that the major renaming has been done, I'm not sure about the merit of renaming individual tips to slightly improve the title, . There are plenty more tips that should be renamed, but I think it would be better to prepare suggested names in bulk, and review them on vim-l. However, if you want to rename a few more, go for it.

I was about to rename this tip to "Different syntax highlighting within regions of a file" or something similar, because the tip is NOT a general-purpose syntax highlighting tip as the title would imply, but instead addresses the very specific (and very useful) ability to include a syntax only for specific syntax regions in a file. For example, I used the concept in this tip to apply the vim.vim syntax file to <pre> sections in the wikipedia syntax file I use to edit tips on this site.

I have no reason for wanting any of the titles - please feel welcome to make any changes. My only reservation is a slight concern about what we'd end up with if we just renamed tips without much thought. You know this, but I'll spell it out. If a tip called T1 is renamed to T2, and then T2 is later renamed to T3, the result is that we would have pages T1, T2 and T3. T1 would redirect to T2, and T2 would redirect to T3, and T3 would be the tip.

That mechanism (of keeping links to renamed pages) is great when a wiki is in a stable condition with good titles. But, despite our recent renaming project, we could probably find 200 tips with slightly silly titles.

I'm probably agonising about this too much, but I wonder whether it would be better to do another renaming project. That is, discuss proposed changes somewhere, then do the changes in bulk (to avoid naming T1 to T2, then later to T3, etc).

I'm definitely going on about this too much! Please do whatever renaming you want. If we do end up with a bunch of useless links, I can delete them.

I noticed that you recently cleared out the "to be deleted" tips. Good call, but I am a little concerned about the tip, "Delete everything but the first n fields in a CSV". Now, I agree with this deletion, and indeed suggested it in the first place, but I thought it would generate at least a little discussion.

I'm not sure what the deletion policy is (or if we even have one), but I nominated this tip for deletion only 2.5 hours before you deleted it. I don't think that is enough time to ensure that any disagreement is discussed.

I'm not sure if you want to undo the deletion or anything, but I think in the future there should probably be some minimum time period to wait before deleting a tip nominated for deletion, except in the case of spam.

Uh oh - thanks for drawing that to my attention. I was confused after having done a bunch of editing on the font tips (the new tip we wanted to merge into VimTip914). I actually spent a couple of minutes wondering about the "Delete...CSV" tip. I think the fact that your comments on it were at the top of the "Candidates for deletion" page made me imagine that it must have been on the list for some time. I'll pay more attention in the future.

Re the tip: Again I spent a bit of time wondering why we'd decided to delete it! I was tempted to discuss it with you because superficially the concept of deleting fields in a CSV file is very appealing. In the end, I agreed with your assessment because the tip was a bit confused with unexplained regexes, and comments pointed out that it was a bit silly because any field containing a ',' would give false results. The original tip, if anyone wants to see it, is at http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=1192 and I could always restore it.

I realise that you don't need any more explanation, but I would like to mention that the final factor was that I overlooked the 'Recent changes' reference to how you had just edited the "Candidates for deletion" page because I generally do nothing more than smile warmly when I see your list of edits.

Re a policy: I definitely did not intend to delete that tip at that time. I would want at least, say, three weeks for public display on Category:Candidates_for_deletion. Even after that I posted a warning on the vim-l mailing list allowing three more days, but actually took a little over a week before I did the delete. That is, deleting the tip in question was a mistake.

John: please don't delete this tip, or undelete it if you wind up doing so before reading this. I added some content to it because I found out how to do it, and it's a feature I'd really like to see! You are right, this is not a help forum and shouldn't be used as such, so I added a note saying as much (and left yours in there as well). Hopefully the author gets the point.

I'm a bit confused about what we should do with this category. You recently removed Exchanging adjacent words from this category. I've been placing certain tips under this category if they don't obviously fall in any other category and they provide a mapping of some complex function. From your comment on this tip, I'd wager that's not such a great thing to do. What are your thoughts?

Again, I have to plead a certain amount of confusion, and again, I hadn't noticed exactly what you've been doing in your edits (otherwise I would have discussed the category map business with you, and I would have been a lot more hesitant about removing the category if I'd realised you added it to that tip).

In tips 1 to 100, there are 28 that use a 'map', and I think it would be reasonable to assume that around 30% of our tips deal with a mapping. I don't see the point of putting them all in the map category. There would be too many for the category to be of any use. Also, if I wanted a tip on how to exchange words, I wouldn't look for a tip in the map category (although any useful method to exchange words is obviously going to involve a mapping).

Unfortunately the explanation at Category:Map is not helpful, but I imagine it should be a list of tips on 'how-to' map, or tricks about mapping.

I'm pretty relaxed about categories at the moment. I think we probably will need quite a long time while we experiment and try things. I suspect that deep thought about the TOC in the Vim help (maybe starting at :help usr_toc.txt) would be enlightening about what useful categories we should have.

The map category was actually already there when I edited it. I wasn't going to change it, but if I did, I would probably have placed it in "usage", another category I use as a sort of catch-all when the other ones don't strike me as a good fit.

But yeah, I see where you're going with the tips about mapping. I'm just not too sure we have very many of those. We might need to settle for tips that use a mapping that happen to demonstrate a useful feature about mapping as a side effect.

I was trying to respond to JosefP, who posted a question on Forum_talk:Index, but I got blocked by the spam filter for some reason. I was trying to post the following:

Hi, Josef!

Good to see you here, but unfortunately the forum is no longer active, since we can use individual pages, talk pages, comments sections, the mailing list, etc. to discuss tips. In addition, as seen on Vim_Tips_Wiki:Community_Portal:

On this wiki, we discuss how to improve tips, but we don't discuss how to use Vim.

Questions about the Vim Tips wiki are best discussed on the vim-l mailing list. You are also welcome to edit the Talk (Discussion) page of any active user. You could view the recent changes, and click any blue Talk link (blue links refer to pages which exist), or edit the talk page of any active user.

I'm going to delete this discussion after a few days, so if you feel the need to continue it, please use my talk page. I would highly suggest posting to the Vim Use mailing list, instead. There are lots of experts there who can answer your questions about using Vim!

In the meantime, regarding your question, Vim can be used to interact with the shell by calling external programs with ':!<program name>' (see :help :!). So, if your audio player includes a command-line interface, this might be the way to do it. If this doesn't help, I would again suggest going to the vim use mailing list.

Hi Fritzophrenic – I spent 10 minutes yesterday futzing around with this issue. I also lost a reply, although I have to tell you that mine wasn't as glorious as yours! In the end, after seeing that JosefP's only post here is the question, I decided to just move on. I don't know any way to resolve this other than contacting Wikia staff. I can well imagine that they do get spam via forum talk pages, and some over-zealous filter is blocking us from posting (I couldn't find that filter). It's a bit brutal of me, but I'm running out of time to do things, and I gave up. It did occur to me that retrying in 24 hours might be successful – I just tried and it still doesn't work. Let me know if you think we should do more (maybe just a post on vim-l would be noticed by Angela).

If JosefP sees this discussion, it would be good if you would add a post here so we don't have to worry that you've missed Fritzophrenic's reply.

Hi Benshi – I'm glad you don't mind my heavy editing! I go into a bit of a trance and don't really look at the content. Now that I've read it more closely, the tip looks really good. --JohnBeckett 23:08, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I have merged the tips and removed the todo section. You might want to change the title to what you had suggested "Open pdf files" or "Edit pdf files". (which is why I did not remove the review section). I did not find a link to change the title.Sridharv 16:07, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for merging the tip. Renaming a page is done with the "move" tab at the top. The procedure is outlined in the title guidelines.

I'm happy to let you choose between "Open pdf files" and "Edit pdf files" – should it be "PDF" in caps? Again, I'm happy for you to decide. If you want to try the move yourself, please do so. There is one page (VimTip1356) that redirects to the tip. If you like, I'll change that page to match whatever new title is given to the tip.

The introduction I wrote was:

Tools are available to extract text from a PDF document, and to create a PDF document from text. These tools can be used to allow Vim to open a pdf file, and even to write to the pdf file, although of course the resulting document will contain only unformatted text.

You deleted the introduction. I think a tip should start with a quick overview of what it's all about. By all means reword my introduction, but I think it needs something. It's not adequate to imagine the reader has studied the page title, so no introduction is needed IMHO. As a minimum, the intro could repeat the title, with a few more words to flesh it out. You are completely familiar with how this tip works, but a reader is likely to be quite mystified about how Vim could read a pdf. That's why I thought outlining what the tools do was worthwhile. --JohnBeckett 04:31, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I am personally agreed with the policy of removing tips that are only links to external sites. Like you, however, I was a bit hesitant to say so to Brett when he joined...I think you did a good job with that. Anyway, I like your suggestion of keeping such tips in an alternate form. I think the best idea would be to create a page like "external links" or "web index" that people can use to add external links to their heart's content. This page could have headings that group by topic (plugins that do X, tutorials, help with feature Y, etc.), or by category (personal web site, source mirror, wiki, etc.). Or maybe we could create a couple such pages, one that groups by category, one by topic, one alphabetically...you get the picture.

Anyway, I do think that external links can be helpful. The idea behind a tip that just links to a plugin is a good one; most people (myself included at times) don't have a clue what scripts are out there, or what they do (that's why the "by topic" might be handy...)

I'm not sure how much effort such a thing would be to maintain, but it would prevent similar headaches to what we have now, because we could make a policy (add it to the very few we have) that "tips are for actual content that can enlighten users without further investigation" but "here's where you can post links to helpful sites". I view it as follows:

I'd like to know if I can answer any questions for you about Wikia's New Style and the changes we need to make to ad layouts to sustain our growth. I saw your comments on the Vim mailing list advising people to wait and see; now that we have a test wiki up at http://communitytest.wikia.com, where you can copy any of your pages to see how they would look in the updated skin, I'd like to know if you have more concerns. Vim is one of our largest tech wikis, and we care what you think.

Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help make this transition easier for everyone. Thanks! — Catherine(talk) 08:14, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi Catherine. Thanks for your interest. I don't see much likely benefit from trying stuff on communitytest (which I have looked at). Our layout must be one of the simplest. Our main page probably will be an issue, but it involves a couple of templates and I am going to be hassled enough over this change without suffering more from dealing with any practical differences between this wiki and the test wiki.

I should point out that Vim is a very powerful text editor used by a very strange group of people. We like plain text. Everything else is an abomination. On the one hand, I am resigned to putting up with ads, and I would far prefer that Wikia be profitable and able to expand with faster systems etc. OTOH, I imagine that Vim users are likely to be one of the groups with the lowest tolerance of intrusive ads, and I'm not sure what's going to happen. Any kind of animation will certainly be the end.

Another concern that I haven't seen mentioned is the speed with which pages can be served. In Vim, we like to press a key and get instant results (which is pretty easy when dealing with pure text). So, again, I think we're going to have to wait and see how things work out. I'm sure there will be teething problems, but that's something that Vim users are familiar with, so we won't be spitting the dummy in the first week/month. --JohnBeckett 10:07, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

These are all realistic and sensible concerns. We are working very hard to optimize the speed with which ads will be loaded as this goes live, and will be listening very closely to feedback and bug reports. We have made it clear to the ad networks that distracting ads are counterproductive on this site, but the nature of the ad business where inventory is sold in chunks means that we may see an occasional low-key animated item -- we will be fighting to keep this to a minimum and to report any particularly annoying brand for removal from rotation. Letting the Community Team know about ads that are unacceptable to your community will help us to deal with them promptly.

I have tried a couple of different possible layouts at Main Page/test, hoping to save you a little annoyance. Make any changes you like or delete and try your own, using the guidelines at Help:Main page column tags. (Note the "ad div" is just a placeholder in this testing design -- when the new style goes live the ad will be placed automatically in the right column and no ad code will appear in the wikitext.)

I am grateful for your patience with our teething issues; we will continue to support your community in every way possible while trying to make our business viable for the long term. Please don't hesitate to communicate your feelings with us as we try to find the right balance. Thank you again for your support. — Catherine(talk) 16:25, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

OK -- that's pretty clear, thanks. I'll try something, but frankly it doesn't much matter if the MP is slightly broken for a day or two (we don't have the same artistic requirements as many of the extraordinary large wikis). I am very sympathetic to Wikia (I had wondered what was their philanthropic source), but I'm pretty doubtful about the long term effects of this on the Vim Tips wiki. Most of the large wikis will probably have to wear flash ads etc, because that's the kind of junk their kind of readers are used to seeing, and they are getting a great hosting deal because their traffic must be pretty high. As mentioned however, I think the Vim community will be one of the groups with the lowest tolerance. --JohnBeckett 05:54, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

If I recall correctly, using a table layout will force the ad insertion to use a banner ad instead of a right-floated div. Is this an option for our main page? It was created with a certain layout in mind.

As far as the actual tip pages go, I don't think it will be too much of a problem, especially if (as I have seen so far on the following two test pages) most of the ads are textual google ads.

I created these two test pages by copying two of our pages. Granted, the templates used don't work at all, but it gives a fairly good idea of what we'll see methinks.

I don't see any definitive statement about how the Main Page will appear (in fact I suspect that Wikia are avoiding being too definitive about anything because they also want to see how things work out). However, I think I read something saying that the MP will have a top-right ad. Here is a quote from Danny@Wikia on 11 June (on first link below):

"Our advertisers expect both a banner and a 300x250 ad on main pages. We know that most of the time, readers are looking at the article pages more than the main page, but advertisers love main pages."

Yes, the main page will need to have a banner and a top-right ad, while other pages will have only the top-right ad. Your test2 looks really good -- are you satisfied with the result? Is there anything else you would like to do with it, but aren't sure how?

If you're happy with it, can you please transfer the code to the live main page today or tomorrow, in preparation for the switchover? Thanks again for your understanding, and let me know if there's anything else I can do. — Catherine(talk) 17:34, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

OK -- I've done that and we are "ready" for ads. We are understanding, but not happy. --JohnBeckett 04:08, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, I'm an idiot. These are just regular spam pages. But a whole lot of them! Hypothetically speaking though, if I were to see a spam account created, what should I do with it? --Fritzophrenic 16:38, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

We know what to do about spam wiki articles, but what about user accounts? How do we report them?

I saw the creation of these two user pages on the recent changes list, and they sure don't look legit! I'm guessing we'll be getting some spam from them pretty soon.

Thanks Fritzophrenic. Maybe I should be promoted to a Bureaucrat and then I could make you an Administrator and you could have the fun of deleting them? At this stage it's probably not essential, but perhaps we should plan for the future. It looks like you'll be able to continue involvement here despite a busy life, so if you like I'll email bastl, and if that doesn't work, I'll get a Wikia staffer.

Sure! And thanks. I'll probably just use it to get rid of spam pages when I see them, at least to begin with. That's something that won't take much more time than reporting it, which I already do. --Fritzophrenic 22:02, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I have just deleted 13 spam pages. I also blocked the IP addresses so they can't post again as anonymous users (1 year for the multiple posters; 3 months for the singles). In the past I haven't bothered blocking IPs because they're very infrequently used again (so a block just becomes another overhead for the Wikia servers). My wild guess is that someone is experimenting with a malicious tool, perhaps with a different wiki in mind as the desired target. At any rate, the amount of spam here has been extremely low, so I don't think it's worth worrying more about it now. I edited your Spam report to indicate what I've done. BTW feel free to edit your own posts to correct a mistake, particularly when no one has replied yet! I had to do that on the Spam report because I had omitted an IP that was different by one digit (which I missed).

If we get much more, I'll post on wikia-l and get more info. However it's easy for an admin to block user accounts (and IPs), so they are not a problem. If I were absent for a couple of days you would just report the whole story on the Spam page (although I think a few of the workers have lost enthusiasm since the ads broke). --JohnBeckett 01:31, 2 July 2008 (UTC)